Asymmetric Core Computing

The free ride of increasing computing performance by constantly increasing processor frequency is coming to an end. The laws of physics combined with economic forces from the consumer electronics industry have created a revolution in computing which is now clearly headed toward "more" instead of "faster" processors. At the US Army Research Laboratory we have established a significant effort which is tasked with finding ways to take advantage of multi-core CPUs, Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), Cell Processors, and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) for both traditional physics-based simulations and real-time battlefield applications. Each of these technologies has various strengths and drawbacks. Our goal is to combine the asymmetric capabilities of the various cores into a complete high performance system. In this paper, we discuss the asymmetric core computing (ACC) Laboratory which we have established along with some of the software tools and applications we are developing.